Fair. Maybe I "cognitively surrendered" a long time ago just as a consequence of working in large teams :(
I hit the breaking point of not being able to read all the code well before LLMs came along. Also people would leave and the documentation for their subsystems would be wrong or incomplete, so there were always mysteries to chase down (during an incident, naturally) even in code written by hand.
Gets to the point, you don't exactly read the MRs, you're mainly checking their approach against what you talked about earlier and making sure it doesn't look way more gnarly than it's supposed to.
Working with agents doesn't feel that different.
> No. They have things built, then they test them. This is different. It might be OK, but it's not the same as building.
It does bug me sometimes when people say "yeah we built the deck..." and they got a contractor to do it. But then we do say things like "Nolan made the film" even though he didn't hold a camera or build the sets. To me, one-shotting doesn't feel like building, but engaging in a loop and applying control to get the outcome you want, does. Regardless of the exact toolset.
I don't personally see super hard lines between using a compiler, a 4GL, a sql query, stitching together 10 libraries and a framework I didn't write, using an LLM or even directing a team.
> Not the problem of one's own skills though.
I read somewhere once we can't weld Saturn V engines anymore, or at least not economically. We would also probably have a lot of trouble finding people who could do all the engine calcs the way they did. It doesn't necessarily mean that rocket progress is stalled.
> Yes. But they wouldn't usually outsource summarizing a letter from grandma, or the political agenda of a candidate/party in an upcoming election. That's surrender.
Agree 100% on the letter from Grandma.
I do say that, too. But I'm not in the film industry. My understanding is that those who are, don't use words as crude as "made" to describe a role in the making of a film. I believe they say that he wrote, directed or produced a film.
We are not talking about some other field of expertise here, where we are outsiders – the production of food, the supply of water, or the making of movies – we're talking about our own field of expertise.
Oh, no, film insiders use ‘made’ constantly, or even cruder - attribute credit without using a verb at all. Saying it’s a “Nolan film” is super common. Here’s a VFX person saying “Nolan’s CGI”: https://youtu.be/AFLcP-t0-kI (I’m ex-film industry, and still film industry tangential, and found this clip being discussed on a film industry mailing list.)
Film people are far more likely to pay attention to who the director is than non-film people, and it’s very common for film people to talk in terms of directors ‘making’ the film or otherwise casually assign ownership. I think this is especially true for famous directors and good films, and maybe a bit less true for unknown directors and mediocre films.